Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

108 reframing latin america
that emerges from them as based on the solid ground of fact, not the whimsical
realm of human thought.
Many modernist theorists have analyzed history from this perspective.
Some, like Adam Smith and David Ricaud, have supported capitalism, while
others, like Karl Marx, envisioned a different form of utopia. We could focus
on any one of these theorists to prove our point, but Marx arguably
provides one of the clearest examples. His basic premise was that human
history is driven by economic conditions. Within any given stage of it, the
engine of change, that is, the force that will advance humanity into the next
and higher stage of lived existence, will be an economic class, a group of
people who share a common economic condition. In the feudal era, Marx’s
engine for change was the bourgeoisie, and in the capitalist era it is the
proletariat (or working class). The assumption underlying Marx’s ideas, and
indeed those of most all modernist thinkers like him, is that members of a
particular class naturally hold the same basic perspective. Out of this has
emerged a long tradition in historical analysis of seeking out the existence
of a particular class, either qualitatively or quantitatively, and then interpreting
historical events from the perspective of the actions of that class.
David Parker dedicates his study of early twentieth-century Peru to this
particular issue. Parker begins by focusing on a strike by urban shopkeepers
in Lima, Peru’s capital city, in 1919. Although Peru was familiar with work
stoppages because of its active labor movement, this strike was different. It
was instigated by upper-level employees who advocated for different types
of benefi ts than their working-class counterparts, such as longer lunch
breaks, more vacation time, and an eight-hour workday. If Parker had employed
a classically essentialist approach, like that of Marx, he would have
interpreted this revolt, and the following decade of middle-class political
activism, as a prototypical example of economic conditions giving rise to
a new social class that then entered politics to defend itself. From this perspective,
what occurred in Peru had already happened elsewhere, and would
be repeated many times over in other countries for roughly similar reasons.
In short, Peru’s middle class had been materially born, joining other middle
classes throughout the world.
Parker is not a strict semiotician, but he brings recent developments
in cultural theory to bear on this series of events in early twentiethcentury
Peru. He acknowledges that Peru’s society was growing more diverse
and that, statistically, more people were earning a living that put them
somewhere between the richest and poorest of society. But Parker interprets
the appearance of Peru’s middle class as an act of social construction
rather than an inevitable outgrowth of objective conditions. He accepts the